I actually have an obituary for William J. Howlett on my desk in front of me, thanks to some recent writing I’ve done. It is taped to the final note he left at the house; this reads simply “KXL xmtr Mon 10/15/84.” The obituary (probably from The Oregonian, though all I have is the bare clipping) reads:

“Mass for William J. Howlett will be at 1 p.m. Friday in Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Portland. He died Monday in a Gresham hospital at age 61.

“Mr. Howlett was born in Portland and had lived in Vancouver, Wash., since 1962. He worked as an announcer and engineer for various radio stations in Vancouver and Portland. Mr. Howlett served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Jasper C. Lent Post 1442 of Portland and Theta Epsilon Kappa fraternity at the University of Oregon.

“Surviving Mr. Howlett are his wife, Jean F. of Vancouver; sons, John R. of Vancouver and James Chadbourne of Auburn; daughters, Julie Hudson of North bend, Nancy of Portland and Kathy Chadbourne of Vancouver; brother, Jack of Menlo Park, Calif.; sister, Julia of Portland; and two grandchildren.

“Burial will be in Mount Calvary Cemetery in Portland.”

According to my journal Bill died 15 October 1984; the mass was held 19 October 1984. The obituary should have appeared in the paper between those two dates.

Great! Thanks so much for posting. I’ll make a copy. It’s too bad the obit doesn’t mention the date when Bill was born but I’ve found a lot of obits don’t. I’m also searching for the date Whitey Coker died. The Oregonian on-line only mentions an obit picture. Do you have any other radio obits of the past?

“KHFS is AM, 1150 on the dial, Hi Fi by virtue of transmitting a bandwidth audio wise of 30 to 15,000 cycles with overall harmonic distortion generally under 1%, except for 30 cps at 2% @ 100% modulation and 7500 up at 3% @ 100% modulation”

Wow! thanks for posting. It would appear that “Hi-Fi” was more than a mere marketing claim. How long did the Hi-Fi transmitter built by Charles Weagant remain in use ?

Again, there were at that time no mainstream receivers that would pass that wide a signal. It would never survive the trip through the IF section even if it made through the front end and mixer. Even those more expensive models that had an IF switch didn’t extend the bandpass that much (it would sound brighter, yes, but in reality would extend the BW from maybe 7kHz to 10kHz but ACI often made it more like an “add noise” switch.)

But the point is that the effort was made by the broadcaster and it appears that this was more than just “marketing hype”. I suspect that a few people in the area owned Scott and other wide bandwidth radios available at that time. Indeed, it is likely that few listeners could detect the difference, but some could.

It appears that most efforts to “improve” AM broadcasting audio quality have really met with poor consumer response:

Years ago, I ran across an electronics hobby book that, as one of its projects, suggested assembling a crystal radio but running the output to the line input of a hi-fi amplifier, instead of the typical high-z headphones. The phrase, “you might hear things you hadn’t heard before” appeared, describing the possible results of such an experiment. I took the vague wording to refer to the improved frequency response of this setup over the typical cheap “All American 5” table radio of the era or over that of the high impedance headphones typically used with crystal radios.

I’m glad that in this case, the broadcaster made a good faith effort to put a high quality signal on the air. Of course, “results may vary” has accurately described the quality of the fidelity of AM reception for many decades. For instance, I was given an early 70s vintage Panasonic AM/FM table radio that has a fairly wide bandwidth and fairly good sounding audio on AM. I have also run across a CBS “Masterwork” receiver of the same vintage that has about the same characteristics in its AM section. Neither of these are DX radios, but they are very well suited to listening to local stations.

I first heard about AMAX in 1992. It was either on a commercial that aired on WAUD or in _Radio-Electronics_ magazine. After seeing what the AMAX logo looked like, in the magazine article, I kept an eye out for it while visiting local retail outlets. Unfortunately, none of the late-model radios that I saw had the logo, and all the ones that I tried sounded as if they had the typical ~3kHz audio response. The only difference I noted around that time was that the new radios covered up to 1700 kHz, in preparation for the expanded band. It was not until 1994 that I was able to get my hands on an AMAX radio (a Sony SRF-42). I had to buy it via mail-order, as it was not available locally. My point behind this story was that for those discerning radio buyers who cared enough to seek out a radio designed to the AMAX standards, the experience was frustrating.

This was the point I was trying to make about KHFS/KKEY but was hard to accomplish without some real specs. The original transmitter was used until it was replaced by the 5kw Bauer in 1968. It remained in the wall for the rest of the station’s run albeit not operable because too many parts had been removed over the years.

Just learned tonight that Fenwick, after leaving KGW as General Sales Manager, got back on the radio by June 1973. The Fenwick Show was on KPOK 10pm to Midnight, Monday through Saturday. At the time KPOK was running a Modern Country format but switched to talk nightly for two hours. This eventually led Fenwick over to KKEY.